1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus. More particularly, the present invention relates to an electronic apparatus and a flexible circuit board thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
Wireless communication has become increasingly sophisticated and now most people carry a cell phone to enable them to communicate with each other. The cell phone has become one of the most important electronic devices for modern people.
The cell phone is so popular today that those cell phone manufacturers make great effort to provide more functions on the cell phone in order to satisfy different user needs. However, it is not easy to integrate those functions in a small cell phone.
In order to increase the surface area of the cell phone, some commercial cell phones can be slid open/close, e.g. a slider cell phone with a keyboard and a display device. In the slider cell phone, the keyboard can provide a QWERTY layout to improve text entry in general, and the display device can also provide an image with an aspect ratio similar to the standard computer image. However, keyboards only having the QWERTY layout are not suitable for dialing numbers in general.
Accordingly, some cell phone manufacturers further provide a kind of cell phone so-called “personal digital assistant (PDA) cell phone”, which has two keyboards configured therein. The PDA cell phone has three electronic modules stacked together. A display device, a dial number keyboard and a QWERTY keyboard are respectively disposed on the electronic modules. Furthermore, the PDA cell phone further includes two slider mechanisms with different sliding directions to slide open/close the display device, the dial number keyboard and the QWERTY keyboard.
In order to maintain the electrical connection between the electronic modules during the sliding operation, the PDA cell phone may further include two I shaped flexible circuit boards with different length directions. However, those I shaped flexible circuit boards each can provide only one degree of freedom by folding them. That is, each electronic module of the PDA cell phone can be slid in only one direction. Therefore, manufacturers have to stack three electronic modules such that the display device, the dial number keyboard and the QWERTY keyboard can be slid open/close in different directions. However, one of the most important current requirements for the cell phone is a small size, but the PDA cell phone with three electronic modules has a lager size than the conventional one, especially in thickness, and thus is not convenient for users to take with them.
Accordingly, how to give each electronic module two degrees of freedom to reduce the number of the electronic modules in a cell phone and maintain the electrical connection between them has been an important issue in cell phone industry.